


Mandrakes

by Frayach



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Autoerotic Asphyxiation, Character Death, Dark Fic Fest, Drug Use, M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-25
Updated: 2012-10-25
Packaged: 2017-11-17 00:00:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/545260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frayach/pseuds/Frayach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Albus has a deadly habit.  What at first feels like heaven can end up feeling like hell.</p><p>
  <a href="http://frayach.livejournal.com/pics/catalog/363/63927"></a>
  <br/>
  <img/>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mandrakes

Backwards. That’s how things often came to me when I was alive. James used to make fun of me about it. Start at the end and follow the path back to the beginning. But I always got there eventually. That’s how it was with the Mandrakes. 

I remember it was raining and we were bored. Dad had promised to take us flying, but he was feeling the start of a flu, and Mum said it was stupid to get wet and cold and sick before Christmas. We were having one of those endless afternoons at the table. Soup, sandwiches, tea, a game of cards, which (as always) Mum won, Wagon Wheels, and then more tea. Lily sat with her arm stretched out on the table and doodled on a napkin. Dad drank cup after cup of hot lemon and honey. Mum cleaned out the fridge, and James listened to his iPod, swinging his feet and kicking me in the shins every now and then. Just as I was about to get up and leave, he removed his ear phones and out of nowhere said:

“You know what they say about Mandrakes.”

“No,” I replied. “Actually, I don’t.”

James chortled in that way he did whenever he was about to say something he knew would earn him a glare from Dad or one of Mum’s aggrieved _James!_.

“They grow from the spot where a bloke’s spunk lands after he’s hanged.”

“Ew!” Lily exclaimed, sitting upright in her chair for the first time since she’d finished her last cup of tea. 

“James,” Mum tut-tutted over the sound of the tap.

“Not at the table,” Dad said between sneezes. 

“Really?” I asked.

“Really,” James said. “Gross, huh?”

“Yeah.” I nodded, completely fascinated. “Really gross.”

“That’s why their roots look like babies.”

“James, that’s enough. Stop telling your brother tales,” said Mum. She walked into the dining room, tugging off her rubber gloves and wiping her brow with the back of her hand. “He’s got enough strange notions in his head without you adding more.”

James rolled his eyes at me, and I giggled. My big brother was always my favourite person in the world. I watch him now. Although he just turned nineteen, he hardly looks like a teenager anymore. His face is grey, and his skin resembles an elephant’s. He looks too small in it, just like I used to look in his old clothes before I grew into them. I want to go to him. I want to tell him it wasn’t his fault – that it was me who’d put two and two together. But I can’t. That’s one of The Rules – no visiting the Still-Livings. 

Later I researched James’ story about Mandrakes on the internet. Sure enough. Mandrakes were said to grow under gallows trees where hanged men sometimes ejaculated on the ground when the support was removed from beneath them and they were strangled by the noose. I couldn’t wait to tell Scorpius. When we returned to school, he and I looked it up in a Herbology book in the library whose prickly spine stung us as though we’d grabbed a handful of nettles when we pulled it off the shelf.

“That’s bollocks,” Scorpius said. That was his newest word. Bollocks. He was forbidden from using it at home, but he wore it out like an old frayed jumper at school. He remained sceptical until we looked up “death erection” in another book titled _Now, Don’t You Wish You Hadn’t Asked That?_

“Cool,” Scorpius said. That was another word he’d been told was “too Muggle,” which meant he said it all the time. “Coming when you’re hanged is called ‘angel lust.’ How cool is that? We could name our band ‘Angel Lust,’ Al. Wouldn’t that be cool? And our first album could be called ‘Death Come.’ Cool, huh?” He strummed his flamingo plume quill like a guitar and nodded frenetically until his neatly styled hair flopped about and his face turned pink.

Scorpius. I watch him too. He really did form a band after all, but it’s not called “Angel Lust.” It’s called Love’s Ligature. I wish the name was an ironic tribute – to me, to us – but it isn’t. It’s deadly serious, and so are the band’s songs. “Choked-Off Scream.” “Till The Devil Cums For You.” “Le Facie Sympathique.” His hair is too long. He rarely washes it, and it looks greasy. His parents kicked him out when he refused to go back to school for his sixth year. He lives in Stockholm now, huffing poppers and shooting heroin in between gigs in tiny shitty venues. Like James, I’d go to him too if it wasn’t for The Rule. He needs to be slapped. Wasn’t it enough to watch me die? What’ll it take? Another brush with death? Or maybe that’s what he wants. After all, his song “Drag Me Down To Hell With You” pretty much says it all, I suppose.

 

The books were illuminating, but it was Teddy who eventually tied it all together. He was in his final year of training to become a licensed Healer. He and James and I were hanging around at the Burrow one dreary March Sunday, playing Exploding Snap and drinking Butterbeer.

“So, Teddy,” said James, “Al has a question for you.”

I scrunched my forehead. I didn’t remember having any questions for Teddy. Dread settled in my bones. James was bored, and boredom and James were never a good mixture.

“Yes, Al?” Teddy asked in his Wise Old Cousin voice. He was obviously aware of James’ teasing tone and, to my chagrin, had decided to run with the joke – or whatever it was going to be.

“I honestly don’t know what he’s talking about,” I said.

James waggled his eyebrows at me and then turned to Teddy. “Al wants to know why sometimes a hanged man gets a hard-on and comes after he’s dead.”

I winced. I was fourteen, and everything was mortifying, especially the words “hard-on” and “come.” The only person I’d ever said those words to was Scorpius, but only because Scorpius didn’t know what they meant.

 _Did your Dad ever teach you about sex?_ I’d asked him.

Scorpius had blushed and looked at his hands. _Not really_ , he’d said. He’d glanced up at me with the bright face of an eager pupil. _But_ you _can_. 

Teddy’s sly grin pulled me back to the present and its accompanying mortification. “Sure,” he said. “What many people _apparently_ don’t know is that an erection is a passive action. When men don’t have an erection, the veins in their dicks contract so that gravity can’t do its work by filling them with blood, which would give them hard-ons.”

To demonstrate, Teddy wagged his finger up and down while James fell over laughing. 

“So,” he continued, “when a bloke dies from hanging, the veins at the base of his dick are no longer contracted, and his dick fills with blood and gets stiff.”

“Okay,” said James, sitting up and wiping the tears from his eyes. “I get the gravity thing, but why does he come?”

Teddy turned his lecherous wink on him. “Now look who’s the curious one? I detect a ruse, Potter. It’s not your ickle brother who’s curious, it’s you.”

James shrugged. “Who wouldn’t be curious?” he asked. “Go on.”

“Well, basically a violent death like hanging causes extreme spasms in the nervous system, which can cause all kinds of shit to happen. That’s why people piss themselves or crap in their pants . . .”

“. . . while some lucky blokes get to come,” said James.

“There are stories – although I’m sure they’re nothing but urban legends – about hanged men being cut down and revived. According to them, the orgasm was mind-blowing.”

“Only a Healer-in-training could make being strangled to death sound hot,” James said. “Does Victoire know about this side of you? Because if not maybe I should tell her. It’d only be the right thing after all. Maybe she’ll realise she needs a younger man who’s not yet perverted beyond hope.”

He and Teddy laughed, and I pretended to. There wasn’t anything all that funny about what Teddy had said. In fact, it was pretty disgusting. But . . . but there was _something_ about it all. Maybe it’d just been the words: Erection, come, dicks, ejaculate, hard-on, orgasm, strangulation. Forbidden words. Words that nudged sensations from my brain like a mother bird nudges her grown chicks from the nest. I felt myself start to get stiff. Teddy must’ve guessed because he smiled at me benevolently and nodded in the direction of the loo. When James asked where I was going, Teddy told him I was “going to water the dragon.” 

Like all the rest of them, Teddy’s not the same now, but unlike James, he puts on a good show. I watch him, and even I can’t tell if he feels guilty like the rest do. But what I _do_ know is that after I died, he changed the focus of his healing practise to adolescent boys even though he’d always wanted to work with younger children. I also know that he published an important and influential paper: _Erotic Strangulation – Induced Cerebral Anoxia and Masturbation and Why Parents Need to be Talking to Their Teens About It_.

 

Cerebral anoxia. The brain empty of oxygen; the lungs empty of air. The Others here want to know what I saw the day I died, but I don’t want to talk about it. Not yet, at least. The Counsellors say it’s good for us, good for the healing process we need to go through to endure eternity, but I don’t want to try to tell it like a story when all I remember is flashes: Scorpius, in nothing but a t-shirt and socks, lips bluish in his pale face, screaming “Daddy! Daddy!” Mr Malfoy bursting through the door, wand drawn, fear, then confusion and finally horror twisting his typically impassive features. A severing charm and hands hands hands everywhere – slapping, swatting, clutching, pinching, pumping my chest, shaking my shoulders. _Expecto Patronum_ cast three times before it created a Patronus. The whoosh of a Floo. Running footsteps on the Manor’s stairs. Healers, Aurors . . . Dad. My Dad. Too late to save his own son. Resuscitation spell after resuscitation spell before the obvious punched him in the stomach, and he fell to his knees. Mr Malfoy kneeling beside him, his arm around Dad’s shoulders, and Dad turning his face against his neck. And Scorpius, still mostly naked, his limp prick dangling beneath the hem of his Wasps t-shirt, and tears streaming down his face. Nobody’s yet noticed that the same marks that bruise my throat bruise his too. But after the initial shock of my death, they will.

 

So much is changed. Of course, Mum and Dad aren’t together anymore. Of all the things I’ve watched from up here, the crumbling of my family was the worst. Mum couldn’t stop crying. Dad drank too much and too often. Lily started cutting. James quit playing Quidditch. At first they talked too much – screaming and laying blame and threatening with ultimatums – and then they stopped talking all together. Mum went “home” to the Burrow and spent five months in bed. James finished school and moved into a flat with his neurotic girlfriend. He’s still unemployed. Lily failed her exams and went to live with Uncle Ron and Aunt Hermione, and Dad . . . well, Dad drank and raged and “took a compassionate leave” from the DMLE that never ended. He’s making custom brooms now and never says anything longer than a sentence. Once in a while, he Owls Scorpius’ Dad, and they spend an evening drinking, playing chess and not talking. Sometimes they snog, but Dad always pushes Mr Malfoy away when he tries to take things to the next level. Mr Malfoy doesn’t seem angry when he leaves, but he does look sad. Later, when Dad tries to masturbate, he breaks down and sobs great big gulping sobs.

Watching Dad and Mr Malfoy together always makes me think of me and Scorpius. Black hair and blond. Green eyes and grey. Sometimes I squint and imagine what _might_ have been . . .

 

“Are we . . . you know, boyfriends?” Scorpius asked one day.

It was the first week of summer holidays between our fourth and fifth years. We were sitting on swings in the playground down the street from my house, kicking at the dirt and squinting at the harsh glint of sunlight off passing cars. It was already uncomfortably warm. I remember wishing I’d worn shorts instead of my jeans.

I looked at him. “What are you on about?” I asked. “We’re just mates. That’s what we’ve always been. What’s all this ‘boyfriend’ stuff?”

He bit his lip and turned his face away. I could tell I’d hurt him even though I hadn’t meant to. He was my best friend and had been since the day we met. 

“So that’s how you feel,” he said in a strange tight voice. “We’re mates. Nothing more.”

I was quiet. I felt like I was walking through a forest full of booby-traps. What did he want from me?

“I’m not a pouf,” I said. I’d meant the remark to be merely informative – I thought I’d stated nothing but the obvious – but Scorpius flinched as though I’d slapped him.

“Neither am I,” he said angrily. He stood up and started walking away. I stood up and ran after him.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked, frustrated and confused.

He stopped and spun around, pointing his finger at me as though it was his wand. “What’s wrong with me?” he asked, breathless and obviously on the verge of tears. “What’s wrong with me is that I’m in love with my best mate, and he doesn’t feel the . . . the same . . . same way.”

The last few words came out as hic-cups. I stared at him. What the hell could I say?

“I love you too,” I said after what felt like forever. “You’re like my brother.”

Scorpius stamped his foot. “I don’t _want_ to be your brother!” he shouted. “I don’t want to be another James! I want . . . I want to be . . . be your boyfriend!”

More hic-cups and another horrible silence.

“I think maybe you should go home,” I said carefully. I didn’t want anything to get said that couldn’t be unsaid. I didn’t know much, but I knew I didn’t want to lose him. “I’ll visit you in a couple of days,” I added.

He stared at me as his whole body deflated. At last he nodded. “Okay,” he said.

We walked back to my house without speaking, but just before he stepped into the fireplace, I pulled him into my arms and held on to him as tight as I could.

“Don’t leave me,” I whispered, and he laughed an incredulous broken little laugh.

“Me leave you?” he said, his breath warm and smelling of the cola cubes we’d eaten earlier. “Don’t be daft, Albus Potter.”

 

Mum and Dad fought about whether the family was going to call my death a suicide or an accident. Mum wanted to call it an accident. Dad wanted to call it a suicide.

“The papers will do everything but dig up his body!” he’d shouted. “What are you going to tell them? Al strangled himself while he was wanking? Jesus, Gin! Isn’t this all bad enough as it is? Why do you want to make it worse?”

“And you’re just going to lie?” she countered. “Maybe others might learn something from his death. Maybe his death won’t be in vain; maybe it’ll result in lives being saved. I thought that’s what you live for, Harry. Saving lives.”

It was a deep cut, straight down to the bone. They both knew she blamed him for not being able to revive me. After all, it was Dad who Mr Malfoy had summoned, and it’d been Dad who’d failed to bring me back to life. This time there’d been no Kings Cross Station.

“They’ll leave him alone if it’s a suicide,” Dad said quietly, his voice rough with pain. “They’ll leave us _all_ alone. I can’t live the rest of my life lecturing fourth-years on the dangers of auto-asphyxiation. I can’t do it, Gin. Call me a coward. Call me selfish, but I just can’t do it.”

In the end, they’d both got their way. Officially, my family called my death a suicide, but it was an open-secret that it hadn’t been. Especially not when everyone learned I hadn’t been alone.

My funeral was held in the same church where Uncle Fred’s had been. It was short and small, which was fine with me. Mum and Dad and James and Lily were there along with Grandpa and Gran and all my aunts and uncles and cousins – and of course Teddy. He was the one who spoke after the vicar. He has a beautiful voice. Dad always told me he sounds just like his own Dad. He said all the right words: “Too young.” “Still with us.” “We will always remember.” The only thing that was wrong – terribly wrong – was Scorpius’s absence. Not that I don’t understand, but it was him not being there that upset me the most. He should’ve been. He needed healing just as much as the rest of them. After all, it hadn’t been his fault. It hadn’t even been his idea. It’d been mine, all mine.

 

“I bet I can come farther than you.”

It was later in the summer – more than three weeks after that horrible conversation. Neither of us had mentioned it since. As far as I was concerned it was over and done with, and Scorpius seemed to think so too. I’d gone to his house a couple of days after like I’d said I would, and we went flying over the Berkshire Downs. Later, we made sandwiches and ate them in the hedge maze. I tried to get the crup to eat a piece of lettuce. She wouldn’t. Afterwards, we went to the pond and threw mud balls at each other until his Mum sent one of the elves to fetch us. There was a lot of goose shit in the pond, and we smelled really bad, which of course was hilarious. His Mum wouldn’t let us use a shower, so we washed off in the enormous fountain with the ugly stone satyrs. After that we ate dinner with his parents, and I went home, and that’d been that.

“Bet you can’t,” I said. “I come so hard I almost put my eye out. It’s a good thing I wear glasses.”

“Bollocks.”

“True fact.”

We were down by the river, far away from the Manor. It was hot and there were a lot of gnats, and, as usual, we were bored.

“Prove it,” Scorpius said in that posh poncy voice of his.

I don’t know why, but it hadn’t felt weird. I pulled off my t-shirt and opened my shorts. I could feel Scorpius watching, but I didn’t look at him. I started getting hard – really _really_ hard – and I came in less than a minute after I started wanking. Of course, I didn’t hit myself in the face. I didn’t even come close.

“You’re full of hippogriff shit,” Scorpius said. 

I looked over at him while I zipped my fly. He had his prick out and was wanking. His face was red, and he made a sound when he came that made me start to get hard again. He was lying back in the grass, propped up on his elbow. His come missed his belly and splattered his chest.

I was seriously impressed.

“Gotta make it last as long as possible,” he said with a huge beaming grin. He was obviously quite pleased. It was usually me who taught him stuff, not the other way around.

Later that night, I got naked and climbed on my bed. I started slow, letting the pressure build incrementally. It felt good – better than usual. I’d never really paid attention to my balls before, but I did that night. By the time I came, I felt like I was going to explode. I fell back against my pillow, breathing hard and watching stars skitter about on the surface of my closed eyelids. My body twitched with aftershocks. I knew right than that I’d discovered something better than Butterbeer – better even than the nips of whisky Scorpius and I sometimes stole from our Dads’ liquor cabinets.

I wanked again in the morning, and it was even more intense. By the time I got out of bed, no one was in the house. Dad was at work. Mum was somewhere with Lily, and Merlin only knew where James was. I walked outside and flopped in the hammock in the garden. Bees buzzed lazily in the lavender, and the bloke next door whistled as he washed his car. Kids rode by on bikes yelling to each other. Every sound and smell seemed magnified. I’d never felt so at ease. I dozed and woke and then dozed some more. My body hummed, and I could feel every inch of fabric I was wearing. The breeze in my hair felt like a caress, and the sun through the trees dappled the world with shifting pools of shadow and light.

“What’re you grinning about?”

Ordinarily, I would’ve been startled by James’ silent approach, but I wasn’t that day. I merely turned my head to look at him.

“I’m grinning because life’s good,” I said. “Life is really really good.”

 

I wish it’d lasted – that sense of satisfaction – but it didn’t. People often said the Potter children would’ve been better served if Dad had married Aunt Hermione. I guess what they meant was that Dad and Mum were too alike. Stubborn, crafty . . . and reckless. When eventually leisurely wanking became rote routine, I remembered the hanged men and the Mandrakes.

The websites on breath play were full of conflicting advice. Some said NEVER EVER _EVER_ try it, and others said it wasn’t dangerous if you didn’t let yourself pass out. Some said you could do it with a rope or a tie or a plastic sack, while others said you shouldn’t use anything and instead hold your breath or hyperventilate. That seemed like a good middle ground, and so I tried it. I stole one of James’ porno mags from his room and looked at it until my dick felt like it’d explode if I didn’t touch it. I started slow like I always did, with lots of lube. I stroked my shaft and squeezed my balls and stuck the tip of my finger in my arsehole. I stopped several times right on the edge, but when I finally let myself go, I sucked in a deep breath and held it . . .

The orgasm blew my mind wide open, and I came all over myself. One spurt even went higher than my tits. I panted and gasped for breath as my whole body shook and my dick kept throbbing long after I stopped coming. I was light-headed, ecstatic, euphoric. Nothing – _nothing_ – had ever felt so intense, so all-consuming. I felt tears of gratitude and release trickle down my temples and into my ringing ears. It was like doing magic for the first time . . . no, it was _better_ than doing magic for the first time.

That realisation should’ve scared the shit out of me. But it didn’t. Instead, it filled me with a secret sense of power – power over both pain and pleasure, power over breath and breathlessness, power even over consciousness. Over death. Each time I slipped under the oil-thick surface of a choked climax and clawed my way back, I thought of Dad – of the legacy he’d bequeathed me. I was a Potter. I was special. Invulnerability was my birth right. I had nothing to be afraid of. I would be the second Boy Who Lived.

 

I can’t paint a picture because I don’t have a body, but if I could, this is what it would look like: Lily’s purple dance tights and a Gryffindor tie – violet and crimson and gold. The precious delicate blue of stopped breath. The deep pink of a rigid cock. Pearlescent strings of semen. A spinning turning kaleidoscope of colour shot through with lightning bolts of ecstasy. It would look beautiful and mystical – as beautiful and mystical as drowning in a lotus pond of pleasure . . .

. . . and then right beside it, I’d hang a second painting: The charred purple of a ligature bruise. The yellow of a urine stain. A protruding tongue, swollen, bloated and bleeding. One green eye open and staring, the other obscured by a drooping lid. Tardieu’s spots the size of Snitches and the colour of an old rotting liver. A vomit of erupting hues shot through with the black ink of a glimpsed death. It would look terrible and grotesque – as terrible and grotesque as the cadaver I became in one single instant of _too late_.

 

When I first told Scorpius what I’d been doing, he was scared. He told me to stop talking about it, that he didn’t want to hear it. He even got angry. But slowly, over the course of a week, the anger retreated before the onslaught of curiosity.

“So,” he said one evening while we were playing with my Xbox, “how do you do it?”

He wasn’t looking at me when he said it; he was staring at the game on the T.V. and concentrating on doing a Wronski Feint.

“I use something soft and drape it around my neck, and then while I’m wanking I twist it until it tightens. I make it so that one more twist will cut off my airway, and then tighten it when I start to come.”

I didn’t look at him either. It was like we were talking about Quidditch All-Stars and not autoerotic asphyxiation. 

“Doesn’t it hurt?”

I laugh. “You’re coming, you idiot. Of course, it doesn’t hurt. It feels bloody brilliant.”

“But what if you pass out?”

“It’s actually best when you do. I have a few times. It feels incredible. But it’s not scary because your grip automatically lets go and whatever it is you’re choking yourself with loosens. You come to when you’re able to breathe again. The last time I passed out my come really _did_ hit my face. It felt like I’d turned inside-out like a sock and spurted out my guts.”

“Ugh!” Scorpius exclaimed. “That’s disgusting, Al, and it sounds dangerous.”

I shrugged. “I’m just telling you the truth,” I said. “You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to.”

“Well, I don’t want to.”

“Okay, fine.”

“Fine.”

We went back to playing our match, and neither of us said a word about our conversation until one afternoon a couple of days later when we were lounging around in his bedroom.

“I want to try it.”

I’d been lying on the floor, playing with his miniature magical beasts. He was lying on his bed staring up at the ceiling. Rain pattered against the windows.

“Try what?” I asked distractedly. The ghoul had just killed and was starting to eat one of the merpeople.

“You know,” he said, sounding peevish that I hadn’t read his mind.

“No, I don’t,” I replied.

“Choking myself while I wank.”

I sat up abruptly, my heart pounding, the ghoul and its prey forgotten in an instant. I’d been waiting for him to say that very thing for what felt like forever. I wanted to do it with him. I knew what it felt like, but I wanted to see what it looked like. I wanted to watch him do it.

“Okay,” I said, trying to mask my excitement with nonchalance. “Right now?”

Scorpius sat up and shrugged. “Why not? What do I need to do?”

I stood and went to his closet, rifling around until I pulled out his Ravenclaw tie.

“This’ll do,” I said. “I use my own tie all the time. Want me to show you how to do it?”

Scorpius nodded. His face was pale, and his eyes were bright. I could see sweat beading on his upper lip. Quickly, I stripped off my t-shirt and shorts. My heart beat so furiously that I felt giddy, and I giggled when my hard-on slapped me on the stomach when I yanked off my pants.

“Budge over,” I said and draped his tie around my neck, twisting it until it was uncomfortably tight, but not _too_ tight. I lay back, and he gave me some lotion he kept in the drawer of his bedside table, watching intently as I coated my dick with it and started wanking. Usually I went really slowly when I choked myself, but I was too embarrassed, so I just stroked myself steadily until I felt my climax start to build. I squeezed my eyes shut, sucked in a deep breath and twisted the tie with a sharp motion of my wrist. I was already slipping into unconsciousness when I came, struggling to breathe, my head swelling to the point of bursting with a fever of adrenaline, rapture and release. Quickly, with fumbling fingers, I loosened the tie and sat up involuntarily, heaving for breath. My come was everywhere.

“Shit,” I gasped and fell back against his pillows. “Holy shit.” I turned my head and looked at him. I couldn’t read the look in his eyes, but I could see that he was hard. There was a spot of pre-come darkening the fabric of his shorts.

“Will you do it for me?” he asked nervously. “For the first time, I mean. I’m scared that I won’t do it right.”

I looked at him, my oxygen-starved brain scrambling to decide whether what he’d asked for was a good idea.

“I trust you,” he said. “We’re . . . you said we’re like brothers.”

I nodded and sat up. “Of course, we are,” I said. “Get undressed.”

The whole thing took _forever_. I got dressed again and leaned against the headboard while he sat between my legs and rested himself against my chest. I wrapped the tie around his neck and criss-crossed it over his Adam’s apple. He was tense, and he kept losing his erection, but at last his hand on his cock started jerking fast and hard, and a faint blush appeared on his heaving chest.

“Are you close?” I whispered, and he nodded furiously.

“Take a deep breath,” I instructed, and as soon as he did, I started choking him.

There’s no other word to describe what happened next except terrifying. And exhilarating. His back arched off the bed as he continued wanking with one hand and scrabbled at the tie with the other. His lips turned blue, and his whole body went rigid and then seized as he came all over his stomach and chest. Immediately, I let go of the tie, and he clawed at his throat with blue-tipped fingers as he gagged and convulsed, gulping for air. When he finally opened his eyes, they were still half rolled back in his head.

“Fuck,” he said, his voice rasping. “Holy _fuck_.”

I grinned. “Told you it was brilliant,” I said. “Think I’d lie to you?”

I helped him sit up, and he dressed slowly, moving as though his arms and hands didn’t belong to him. At last, he turned to look at me.

“I’m glad I tried it,” he said solemnly. “I really am, but I never _ever_ want to do it again.”

I nodded, feeling both disappointed – and very relieved at the same time.

 

I’d realised later that I’d choked Scorpius for too long. I’d almost seen what it looked like to die of asphyxiation, so I wasn’t surprised by the sight when I rose up from my body and looked down on myself: I was dying. My face was blue, and my body flopped around like a fish out of water. I bit my protruding tongue and bloody saliva dribbled from the corner of my mouth. The sickest thing, though . . . the sickest thing was that I was still coming in huge shuddering spurts.

Scorpius had come before me. He was sitting up on the bed beside me, rubbing his neck. I watched from above as he turned to look at my quaking heaving body. The dull light of breathless euphoria left his eyes in an instant, and he grabbed at my hand, trying to pull it away from the ligature. But the struggle only made things worse. In my dying terror, I fought against him. I even kicked him in the balls. He didn’t acknowledge the pain. Instead he kept trying to free me from my own noose. Trying and trying and trying . . . and then failing. His screams were hoarse from his own choking, but they echoed through the Manor’s empty halls. I can still hear them now two years later. It’s like he never stopped. Or maybe his screams slashed through the veil that fell between us. I don’t know, and when I ask one of the Others about it, they tilt their heads and listen for a moment before looking at me sadly and saying they can’t hear anything. That all is peaceful and still. _You’re safe_ , they say. _You can rest now_.

But they’re wrong. 

They say here that we shouldn’t dwell on regret, on “what ifs.” What happened happened, and we can’t go back and change it. But if I could, I’d return to the day before Scorpius and I went back to school for our fifth year. That was when Scorpius said he wanted to try it again. After that, there was no reason to stop, and we urged and taunted each other into ever lengthening periods of breathlessness. We did it whenever we could get away with it, in empty bathrooms and broom closets and remote unused classrooms. Then we went home for the Christmas holiday to the freedom of Scorpius’s enormous bedroom. That’s where it’d happened. The day before Christmas.

Happy Christmas, everyone.

I know it’s too much to ask that I never started. It’s even too much to ask that I never helped Scorpius do it that first time. All I ask is that I’d never let him do it again. All I ask for is the chance to go back and erase the inevitable. It’s too much to ask that I never died, but is it too much to ask that Scorpius hadn’t had to watch it? Is that just simply too much?

 

Scorpius got high the other night and got a tattoo. I watched every minute of it. I watched the way his body flinched minutely at the first touch of the needle and the way sweat dampened his hair, causing it to cling to his neck. The tattoo is ugly. It covers his entire back with heavy dark lines that desecrate his pale skin. The artist was a Muggle, and he was crap at his job. He didn’t even know what a Mandrake looked like and relied entirely on Scorpius’s slurred description. It looks like two withered corpses hanging from a clump of hoary leaves and purple flowers. I hate it with a passion, but Scorpius was pleased. He staggered out of bed the next morning, puked in the sink, and then turned to look over his shoulder at his new tat in the mirror. Slowly, a grin crawled across his shallow face – a hideous parody of his old impish smile. That night he went back, but this time he was sober. He handed the artist a piece of parchment whose words I couldn’t read. I had to wait as they took shape over the course of the next several hours until I knew what they said.

 _Angel Lust_ appeared across his skinny shoulders in a flowing script, and then on his lower back _Albus Severus Potter 2006-2021_. Later that night, he choked himself with a rope until he passed out, the raw needle-pricked words bleeding into his sheet – the same sheet he used to wipe up his come when he coughed and gagged himself back to consciousness. His lips were still blue as he fell into a fitful sleep. The rope was rough, but by morning, the abrasions it left had scabbed over. He didn’t heal them. He never did.

 

“Now, class, please turn your attention to page 143 of your textbooks. We’ll be transplanting Mandrakes today. Remember to wear your earplugs – you won’t enjoy the sound they’ll make when you tear them from their pots. If you think Peeves is the loudest, most obnoxious thing you’ve ever heard, then you’ve never heard an uprooted Mandrake.”

To illustrate his point, Professor Longbottom stuffed his ears with cotton.

“I think it’s bollocks,” Scorpius whispered. “Plants don’t make noise.”

I shrugged. When you’re one of Harry Potter’s kids, nothing seems outlandish.

“Just do it anyway,” I whispered sternly. I was four months older than him, and when you’re eleven, that’s a very big deal. Besides James, who was a third year, I was The Font Of All Earthly Wisdom.

I put my earplugs in, and Scorpius followed suit. Inhaling a deep breath and gritting my teeth, I seized the Mandrake’s leaves and yanked as hard as I could while Scorpius did the same.

The resulting sound was like . . .

I’d tried to describe it afterward, but my first year’s vocabulary wasn’t equal to the task. I can now, though. It’s the sound a man makes before the noose crushes his trachea. It’s a father’s cries when he sees the lifeless body of his child. It’s the inconsolable wailing of a friend who’s been left behind. It’s the anguished call of a soul that never got to say good-bye but nonetheless keeps trying.


End file.
